I am currently working on one of my book manuscripts that will be
published later this year. This book (tentatively titled "Hang Time") features movie and music essays, as well as personal essays. Right now, I am performing one final copy-editing sweep, tightening up the chapters, cutting out what works, and seeing what needs to be added in order to reach my goal of 80k words. One other manuscript is finished, and there are two others I'm planning to complete before launching.

Four years ago, I published a list of "50 Great Movies," give or take a couple extras. I decided to rewrite and revise that list for Hang Time, and share the results with everyone on Ghibli Blog. This is a very lean and mean list of great movies that mean everything to me. These movies have inspired me, thrilled me, challenged me. It's all very personal and not meant to be an academic study of "the greats," whatever that means. Art is only valuable if it means something to you. Right?

I wonder if I should turn this list into a book? That's always a possibility for a future project, however I believe there are already many Greatest Movies books available now. What do you think? Would you like to see this list expanded into a book? For now, I will leave that decision to you. My plate is very full at the moment. I need to figure out what to do with the Studio Ghibli book project.

Anyway, please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions, and thank you very much for supporting Ghibli Blog. You are the reason all of this exists.

3 comments:

An interesting list. I always think people's personal lists are much more interesting than "objective" ones, mainly because it is impossible for people to be 100 percent objective about art. Everyone approaches every movie differently, leading to all these diverse responses. I also like to think the stories and filmmakers we connect to the most say a little about ourselves, our own lives, not merely our taste.

I watched part of an episode of The Big Bang Theory and one of the character's female friends pointed out that the Nazis would have been vaporized by the arc of the covenant even if Indiana Jones hadn't intervened.